


A Little Friendship

by Umbralpilot



Category: Red Cliff, Sān guó yǎn yì | Romance of the Three Kingdoms - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, pretty Chinese poetry, tea is a metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-06-10
Packaged: 2017-12-14 13:45:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/837564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's hard for a doctor to stay healthy in an epidemic. Fortunately, Xiǎo Qiáo also dabbles at a thing or two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Friendship

**Author's Note:**

> For [Paperiuni](http://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni), with love.

It was Xiǎo Qiáo who first noticed it, deep into the late autumn night after Liú Bèi had departed, leaving his chief strategist behind. Zhōu Yú was sharp as a blade, and nothing escaped his eye and ear, but perhaps he was holding himself back from reading Zhūgě Liàng, in a gesture of trust, or perhaps even of testing, fascinated to see how deep his immediate, unspoken understanding of the younger man reached. But he had made no comment, and either way it was Xiǎo Qiáo who had stayed, long after the other Southern generals and advisors had retired to rethink their plans and rue the day that they had ever trusted the crafty owl Liú. It was she who had remained sole witness to the rattle of Zhūgě Liàng’s pestle and mortar as he mixed his medicine, and subtly listened to the crackling of his little fires, constant and woven through the moans and mumbles of their sleeping patients. She glided between them silently, watching them now more for her own comfort than theirs. All soldiers were boys in their sleep. She knew that she ought to leave, and thought, soon; she would be able to rest in just one more round, when she had made certain that there were no nightmares in the camp, and no soldier crying in a delirium for a family that he may never see again. If it had not been for the minute sounds of Zhūgě Liàng’s tools, she might have forgotten his presence. It startled her when she heard his voice, raised in a soft, low song.

The surprise was even greater when she realized, a moment later, that the tune was a Southern one: a peasants’ work song from Yùzhāng, calling to mind its tune tantalizingly close to the lullabies of her own Lújiāng. For a moment Xiǎo Qiáo felt tears in her eyes, and some of the soldiers sighed and turned in their sleep, clutching blankets as if remembering protective arms. Then the tune cracked, the singing voice caught on a rasping breath. Xiǎo Qiáo froze, listening with her heart fluttering like a doe’s as Zhūgě Liàng coughed, the sound muffled almost to nothing against his sleeve, low enough to wake no sleepers but audible in the stillness of the night. He too had forgotten that she was there, and awake.

She straightened, sparing a last glance at the soldier at whose side she had crouched. Her shadow was willowy yet vast against the side of the tent and cast in blurred shifting lines. The dim sounds of the cough and heavy breathing stopped at once. She glanced back and found him looking up from his own work, sleeve still raised against his face, his dark eyes glittering from within heavy shadows. Then she saw it all at once and was shocked that the others had not. His easy vitality, light as a feather, was drawn brittle over too-bright eyes and clammy skin, stiff shoulders and uneven, tremulous breathing. Her feet moved swiftly of their own accord. She crossed the distance over to him, and became still.

A heartbeat stretched long in silence. Zhūgě Liàng studied her. She saw his face shift minutely in an effort between smiling reassuringly, and not.

“Zhūgě-xiānshēng, you’re ill,” she said softly. 

“You’ve found me out,” he answered, and the smile won out. Its edges were frayed, but his hands were quick to wipe the hint of sweat at his brow, take the pulse at his own wrist. 

“It’s hard for a doctor to stay healthy in a plague,” he said, businesslike. “But these are the earliest signs, so fūrén shouldn’t be concerned. Some medicine and a day’s rest, and I will recover well in time for the battle.”

He flicked his sleeves back and dipped his hands in a bowl of water to clean them before picking up his work again. Xiǎo Qiáo followed his movements with her eyes alone. She wanted very much, she realized, to ask him about the work song. People did not spring full-grown from the earth or the waters. They had parents, families, villages, childhoods and loves and all the joys and sorrows that came from those. Even people like Zhūgě Liàng – if there were any other people like him in the world. 

Xiǎo Qiáo didn’t play the qín, just as she did not study the art of war. All the same, she had learned to read music well. She had practiced her own art and listened while her husband played with this half-stranger, with his endless parade of talents and the war that he had brought to their doorstep and that he now flowed through light and bright as quicksilver. Zhūgě Liàng’s tunic and robe were the color of summer dust now, and his glittering eyes narrowed slightly with the press of a dull but persistent headache. She edged closer to him, just a little closer. He did not withdraw. She put her hand down on the mortar and pestle as though to still their sound.

“Do you have the medicine?” she asked. She watched his gaze shift, sideways and down.

“I have the ingredients to treat one or two patients,” he said. “I have been keeping them, in case my lord fell sick, or Viceroy Zhōu. Or… anyone else that we cannot do without.”

His eyes darted up again. She held them, and could see that that surprised him. 

He turned back to the powders he was mixing, but Xiǎo Qiáo’s hand crept forward. His light movements stilled as their fingers met on the edge of the bowl, on the cusp of touch.

“Come with me,” she said, “I want to see that you get some proper rest.”

His eyes crinkled with a wry grin. “Does fūrén also mix medicine?”

“I dabble,” Xiǎo Qiáo said with a smile of her own.

Even she had to admit, there was a certain delight in seeing Zhūgě Liàng confounded. He looked down at the scattered cassia leaves, and up at her; past her, at the sprawled soldiers, the gape of darkness showing outside the tent where all of Red Cliff slept. Then he coughed again, hastily leaning into the crook of his elbow. The fit was quick and breathless, softer than he needed, held back tightly into the space of his body so that sound did not escape, the effort did not show. Xiǎo Qiáo’s fingers moved once more. When he had recovered, she was holding, gentle but steady, onto his arm.

“Please,” she said again. “My husband cannot do without you.”

So close, she could feel the faint rasp in his throat, and the fever through the rough-spun cloth of his tunic, driving small chills that vanished in the swiftness and lightness of his constant movement. Her hand tightened slightly until she felt the solidity of his bones. “I know that your lord is gone. But please, come with me if you still trust in your friends,” she said.

He stiffened, a hint enough that she saw that he understood, and then his head slowly dropped as tension drained from his shoulders. He smiled his quicksilver smile, and nodded, banking the fires and putting his hawk’s-wing fan aside.

Xiǎo Qiáo followed him to the rear of the tent, where a pallet had been laid out, no different from the soldiers’ except for its isolation. It was not surprising to realize that he had foreseen his illness and had prepared his own bed within the quarantine. As he settled down onto it and shrugged off his outer robe, she was already kneeling by its side, folding her legs carefully about the dust and pebbles, to pry at a cloth bag and withdraw a fresh bowl and bunches of leaves, dried and labeled. Sitting on the pallet, Zhūgě Liàng watched her for a moment, his face unreadable, before his eyes drifted shut. He finally lay down, while reaching up to undo his topknot.

“Fūrén – “ 

“Xiǎo Qiáo.”

His eyes opened briefly, and then he smiled. “Kǒngmíng, then.” She nodded in return, her smile small and shy, and he resumed speaking through the sounds of her pestle at work. “Xiǎo Qiáo, you are skilled at this. It seems everyone in the South is hiding a talent.”

“That puts you in good company,” she said.

He laughed low, but she saw his brows knit together as the smell of the medicine reached him, in unhappy expectation of its taste. She watched him shift on the pallet, and let the pestle rest to touch the back of her hand against his brow. His fever was rising, and it would remain high, she knew, until and unless the herbs took their effect. Either way, it would be a long night. 

She took the pestle again, and her hands moved to a different rhythm, one like the flow of fingers on the qín. She did not have her implements; the scene was different here, in the night in the heart of the military camp, but the flow of the ritual the same, its gestures their own time and space. She poured the water from a height and watched the small bubbles like fishes’ eyes in the bowl. From the corner of her eye, the edge of another world, she saw that Zhūgě Liàng was watching. Xiǎo Qiáo did not play music, but her hands spoke, the arch of her delicate wrists and her fingertips through the steam. She stirred the medicine, and the ripple of waters told him all there was to be said.

She raised the bowl and handed it to him with smooth elegance. He sat up to take it, careful, their hands almost meeting, again, on the warm smooth wood. Zhūgě Liàng drank the medicine slowly, for all its bitter tang, breathing in the drifting steam and pausing to appreciate the color of the brew. When he was done she reached to take the bowl from his hands, but he held on to it. He caught her eyes. He was young, she thought; it had been difficult, before, to gauge just how young.

“Xiǎo Qiáo,” he said, a little breathless from fever and bitterness, “I am sorry that I have brought this war to your family.”

Your family, he’d said. Xiǎo Qiáo’s belly tightened, the cage of her ribs constricting. She felt her own flesh for a moment, warm and fragile, also, not without knowledge, not without fear. But the life within her was growing and her body did not shrink to guard it. She felt it as a core of strength. She felt it as it was, stubborn, leaping life.

She glanced at Zhūgě Liàng, whose body was now failing to match the strength of his conviction. He had come into their lives like a wind out of season, and slipped between moments of war as though between drops of rain. That light and flowing movement had stopped. She saw him as she saw all the other soldiers, the sleeping boys.

She leaned closer in and hushed him.

“It was Cáo Cāo who brought the war,” she said. “You have brought my husband allies and friends, a chance to win. You’ve brought him hope...” her voice dropped low, almost a whisper, “and not only to him.”

His eyes lingered on her face, and she could see how he had drunk in her words as he’d drunk the medicine, to the last dregs of their sound and meaning. Zhōu Yú often spoke of friendship, but he was sharp as a blade, the steel close to the silk of his smiles. They spoke to each other of war within their music, and he kept his own counsel and delight blazed when their thoughts ran together, unexpected that such thoughts could ever be paralleled, and as dangerous as it was welcome, like the gust of a fresh cold breeze. But Xiǎo Qiáo spoke with the wafting warmth of the steam from her tea, and with tenderness that need conceal nothing. Her softness did not conceal strength because it was not weakness. She spoke of friendship, and her tender words did what blades could not.

Now Zhūgě Liàng smiled faintly at her, and she could read his eyes as openly as she had read his music, and knew that this night, illness, war and all, he would rest easy. Now she too could sleep. Now she could go home, to the peace of Zhōu Yú’s arms and dreams of his carrying their child on his shoulders up the forested hills of their home, leading Méngmeng behind them. But perhaps not just yet, not just yet. Zhūgě Liàng thanked her with a low bow, without trying to weave clever words. He lay back again and drew up his covers, nestling in them against the chills of fever as they slowly eased. Xiǎo Qiáo was silent, watching him, then the soldiers, then outside, the glimpse of the Southern night.

“Kǒngmíng,” she said, “what was the song that you were singing?”

He didn’t open his eyes to answer her, but she didn’t feel it an impoliteness. His voice flowed in a low murmur, as though halfway asleep already and speaking in a dream. “My uncle was governor in Nánchāng when I was a young boy, and our family lived there together. The farmers would sing this song when my brothers and sisters and I were helping in the fields. The scenery here in the Southland, the hills and the river, made me remember.”

He lay in silence for a moment, then hummed a soft note, at first hoarse and a little off key. Then it cleared, and she knew it once more, the tune as plain as peasants’ gruel. It spoke of nothing warlike, but of summer rains, of children herding geese in the rice paddies and farmers gathering peaches and planting bamboo shoots. But once again his voice could not hold out and he was soon mumbling apologies between coughs, unable to conceal his misery. 

Xiǎo Qiáo hushed him again, murmuring a soft comfort, and his breathing calmed, moment by moment. Comfort was easy to offer, with Jiāngdōng - home to them both - bright in her mind, brought into clarity by its music after so many years. In the midst of the camp, she smelled the breeze on the peak of Tiānzhù Shān, wild herbs and soft-shell turtle stew and the dishes of the New Year Festival; she heard childhood lullabies in her mind. She crossed her hands over her belly, though it had barely begun to swell, and thought of the children of the Southland, of Méngmeng climbing at last to her feet, and of hope.

Softly, she began to sing.

_Green, green_  
 _The cypress on the mound_  
 _Firm, firm_  
 _The boulder in the stream_  
 _Man’s life lived within this world_  
 _Is like the sojourning of a hurried traveler_  
 _A cup of wine together will make us glad_  
 _And a little friendship is no little matter_

**Author's Note:**

> The song that Xiǎo Qiáo sings, _The Cypress on the Mound_ , is one of the [Nineteen Old Poems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Old_Poems), translation by Arthur Waley.  
> The tidbit about Zhûgě Liàng having himself lived South of the Yangtze as a boy, which is really what got this story started, is historical. The reference to brothers and sisters is also historical - he had two of each.  
> Some liberties were taken with the course and curing of typhoid fever. The movie has people pole-jumping with spears and tackling horses. Deal with it.
> 
> Paperiuni beta'd this like a champ, but the real reason it's for her is because she is generally amazing. And sat with me through all five hours of Red Cliff. And is generally forgiving of the sounds I make when Takeshi Kaneshiro emotes. Yeah.


End file.
